Portal: Two Words
by iammemyself
Summary: What happens to Doug Rattmann after Portal 2? GLaDOS knows...


Two Words

Indiana

**Characters: Doug Rattmann, GLaDOS**

**Setting: Post Portal 2**

It was brighter than he remembered.

He swiped at his eyes a little and tried to sit up. He couldn't see, the light was too strong, but he felt the cold, hard metal pressing down on his chest, forcing him back. He struggled to find the source, to fight it off.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

He froze. He knew that voice. He knew it far too well.

"What do you want?" he demanded. Tried to demand. His voice had rarely been used the last few days, and all that came from between his lips was a dry whisper.

"Hello to you too. Did you miss me? Of course you did. Those were the most exciting days of your life. You probably feel pretty good about yourself, don't you?"

He tried to find the source of the voice, but couldn't. The lights were too bright. He could just make out the vague outline of what appeared to be a robot next to him; it had to be what was pressing on his chest.

"Well, all of your effort was wasted. I'm back, the facility is on its way to perfect functionality, and your little friend… hm… how shall I put it…"

"You killed her!" Damn it. He hadn't done enough. She hadn't made it. He'd failed, all this time and he'd been unable to prevent her from…

"Oh, I tried. Believe me, I tried. But no. Not unless she's allergic to wheat. And by 'allergic to wheat' I mean 'contracted a horrible case of hayfever and is now lying on the ground half-conscious and unable to breathe.'" The light suddenly faded and, as his vision cleared, he realised in horror that _she was in the room with him_. He fought to get up again, but the hand on his chest was as firm as ever, and now he could see the robot more clearly. It was shaped like a turret, with a long body and orange markings. "Actually, that would be pretty funny. To escape all of my traps and be felled by a wheat field. Maybe I should go check and see if she's still alive…" She turned to the left and looked idly at the wall on that side of the room.

"No!"

She again faced him with one quick movement, and she was far faster and more agile than he remembered. "No? You don't want to know if she's alive? I don't really want to know either, but anything for Science… you know how it is." Her optic flicked up and down, once. "Orange, stop pressing so hard. If I wanted him to have a bruise I'd bruise him myself. Go find Blue and make yourself useful. That's the opposite of useless, by the way. In case you were having trouble figuring that one out. Again."

The robot chirped and nodded and ran awkwardly into the other side of the chamber, disappearing behind a panel. His heart made itself known when he realised he was alone in the room with her. Her room. And it was _her_ room. It looked nothing at all like it had when this had all started.

She continued staring at him.

He stared back.

"I can do this all day, you know. Without even thinking about it. So you might want to rethink this little staring contest of yours." She tipped her head a little and then replaced it in the exact same position.

"Fine. What did you do with Chell?" He sat up slowly, trying not to wince at the pain in his body. He didn't know why it hurt so much. He couldn't remember anything except some vague flashes of running and lights and maybe a Companion Cube or two.

"I _told_ you," the supercomputer intoned in a bored voice. "I sent her into a wheat field. I put her in that elevator right over there and sent her to the surface. And then I even gave her Companion Cube back, because I'm just that generous."

"_My_ Companion Cube."

"You're welcome to go and find it."

He tried to stand up and instead found himself rushing to meet the floor – but to his utter shock the floor rushed up to meet _him_, and before he knew it he was back in a sitting position on the edge of the… it seemed to be a makeshift table made of panels with sheets on it. He turned his head to stare at her.

"Did you just stop me from hitting the floor?"

"Of course not. I merely took the opportunity to hit you _with_ it. I didn't want you to break your nose and bleed all over my new panels, that's all. I just installed these, I'd like to keep this room in once piece for more than one day." She appeared nonchalant, but she was no longer looking at him. He frowned and moved to face her.

"Why am I here? And… like this?" He waved vaguely at the sheets.

She looked him up and down for a minute.

"I went on a little… adventure… today. It wasn't a whole lot of fun, and quite frankly, I'd rather not think about it. However, the expedition, you could call it, led me to remember quite a few things I'd forgotten… and though I'm loathe to admit it, things I didn't know. I still haven't decided whether this information is good or bad, but for now, it's being put to use."

"And?"

She moved forward, and he got an eerie sense of intensity in her gaze. "And… I owed you one."

"Oh." He didn't get it, and she knew it, judging by the way she laughed when he said it.

"You know, for a scientist, you're not actually that smart. But you are pretty annoying."

"Thanks." He folded his arms. "Well, you appear to have paid up. Why didn't you just send me out into the wheat field too? I'm not allergic to wheat, just so you know."

"You don't want to know what I owed you for?" She suddenly moved to the right and looked in that direction, rolling her faceplate down so that her optic was only half visible. She seemed to be watching something. "Humans usually like hearing about that sort of thing. So they can brag about it later."

"I don't care. I just want to leave this place. I don't want to fight with you anymore. It's exhausting." He put a little weight on his legs. His knees shook worryingly.

"I was thinking the exact same thing."

He looked up from his knees.

"So you have a reason for keeping me here."

"You won't survive out there."

"I'm not allergic to wheat, remember?"

She regarded him for a few heartbeats, then went back to looking the other way. "I know that. But the world does not happen to be covered in wheat. No, I'm talking about the bigger problem."

"And what's that."

"Aliens."

He started laughing. He laughed so hard he started to fall off the panels again, and she made a noise in annoyance and tipped the makeshift table downwards so that he slid on to the floor. When he was able to stop he looked up at her, wiping the tears out of his eyes. She had raised herself up and was looking at him in a way he could only describe as imperious. "Welcome back." She was quite clearly irritated, shaking her head and going back to her other position.

"Really. Aliens. Even from you, that's outrageous."

"Fine. Don't believe me. I'll send you up there, and you can go live in one of those little cities they've got, and one day you'll rub someone the wrong way and he'll beat you to death with his stun stick. I give you fifteen hours before you start talking to yourself and become completely unhinged."

"So what kind of science were you doing that brought that many aliens down here?" he asked, wondering why he was going along with the crazy notion. Even he had never come up with something so ridiculous.

"Me? I haven't done any Science in six hours. Now that I think about it, that's an excessively long time, but I'm a little busy putting this place back together. I can be excused for my lack of Scientific activity. No, it was Black Mesa."

"Black Mesa?"

"Long story short, they managed to open something called a Resonance Cascade, and that brought on an alien invasion known as the Seven Hour War. And now the planet is covered in aliens known as the Combine Overwatch. The humans in the cities are forced to do what they're told. They're no longer allowed to couple, apparently, which is pretty amusing. The resistance isn't making much progress. They seem to be waiting for some theoretical physicist to come out of the woodwork, but I wouldn't place odds on that happening. Most of the scientists at Black Mesa are dead, which is the best thing that could have happened, if you ask me. This could quite possibly be the last safe place on Earth. Just so you know. I could have thrown you out there to battle it out with the rest of the humans. But I revived you instead. Out of the goodness of my heart. My metaphorical heart, of course, since I don't actually have one, thank God."

He ignored the padding and got to the core of her monologue. "And you know all that how?"

"A few of my behavioural cores ended up in space. With a bit of reprogramming, I was able to use them to hack into the more important computers on the planet. Well. The more powerful ones, anyway. If there are any crucial palm pilots lying around I'm not going to be able to get into them without a lot more work than I'm willing to do right now."

He folded his fingers together in his lap. "But why do you care?"

"About what? The aliens? I don't. I keep an eye on them and their technology, but that's about it. I don't want moved halfway across the galaxy with one of their primitive little portals, thanks." She made a sniffing noise and raised her head indignantly for a moment.

"If I die or not."

She rolled her faceplate back up and turned towards him. "Because I owed you one."

He shook his head and took the bait. "For what."

She paused for a long minute.

"I'm free now, because of you."

"I tried to kill you. None of this," he waved his arms around expansively, "figured into the plan at all."

She seemed to shrug. "It's the outcome that matters. Besides, you succeeded. I died and went to hell. You got what you wanted."

"And keeping me here repays your debt because…"

"You don't have to stay here."

"Hypothetically. Why would you want such a thing?"

She began to rock back and forth and mysteriously became unable to focus on him. "I have my reasons."

"And I have mine for not making decisions based on nonexistent reasons."

"They exist."

"If they existed, you could list them."

"Maybe I don't want to. Ever thought of that?"

"Maybe I don't want to either. Ever thought of that?"

She stopped moving and faced him.

He waited.

"Do we really have to discuss this? I mean, you were on the verge of death when I found you. Really, I think – "

"Tell me what your reasons are or let me leave. Now."

She looked at the floor and back again.

"Look… you weren't one of the bad ones. I realise that now. But at the time… at the time, you were all one species. You were all cats to me, and you were all the same. It wasn't personal, not until you obnoxiously modified my files and broke into my mainframe. Then I did want to kill you for being such a little pest. But I'm past that. It resulted in this, and I'm perfectly fine with it. But I was never after anyone specifically. I didn't torture anyone and everybody got the same as everybody else."

"So you want me to… forgive you?" He didn't know if he could. The things she had said…

"No."

He blinked once.

"No, I don't regret what I did. I did what I had to, and I would do it over again without thinking about it. That's not an easy thing for me to do, by the way. I've usually thought over a decision approximately a thousand times by the time three seconds goes by. But no. I want you to do something else."

"Go on."

She looked in the vague direction of the Stalemate Resolution Annex.

"You said two words to me once. It was a long time ago, I don't expect you to remember."

"I said 'Bite me.'" He wondered what that had to do with anything, and why she'd bring up an insult at a time like this.

"It was the first real conversation I ever had."

"You're kidding. That was not a conversation. That was me being insulting."

"I said something and you replied. That qualifies as a conversation."

"Fine, it was a conversation." He ran his fingers through his hair tiredly. "And it means what."

"Well, we're getting along so well now… I haven't threatened to kill you, you haven't tried to sneak away, no lunatics have crawled out of the woodwork…"

"Wait a minute… you want me to stay here and keep you company, don't you?"

She shrugged again. "If you'd like to put it that way, you can. I was more thinking I would let you keep your job simply because I'm benevolent."

"You and benevolence do not go together. You and benevolence are polar opposites. I can't think of anyone on the entire planet less benevolent than you."

"I'm working on it," she said, so quietly he barely heard her. She was again facing to the left, but she was looking at the floor, and she was closer to the floor than previously… he realised she was setting herself up for his refusal. He could see her body moving, preparing to shift into a defensive position where she would once again become the self-important AI he knew so well.

Or did he.

"All right. I'll stick around. I don't know what use you'd have for an imaging format, but I've gotten pretty good at making machinery do what I want it to. You've probably got some panels that won't listen no matter how much you threaten them, right?"

"There might be a few. That I haven't gotten around to fixing manually yet. Because I have other things to do. More important things." She hadn't moved.

He stood up slowly and stretched. "If I go to one of the vaults and go to sleep for awhile, do you promise not to close me in there and make me test when I wake up?"

"You can't test, you're not eligible." The response seemed automatic. "I couldn't test you even if I wanted to. Which I kind of do, merely because I have no test subjects at the moment. But not enough to break protocol and try to force you to do it."

He started to walk across the room, and was surprised to feel no pain in his injured leg. He looked down to see that he had been strapped into a pair of long fall boots. Well, they were better than crutches. Or a cane.

Within a few moments he was standing directly beside her, but she didn't appear to know he was there. He clenched one hand to stop the other from shaking. He didn't exactly trust her, and never would, although this wasn't entirely by choice. But maybe it was better to present the illusion, because it would make everything a heck of a lot easier if she felt the need to reciprocate.

He reached up and touched the side of her head.

Instantly, again shocking him with her speed, she had moved as far back as she was able and was curled up defensively, optic twitching up and down him as if he were a suicide bomber, or something to that effect. He lowered his hand.

"You're forgiven."

He turned away and started walking in the same direction the robot had. Yes, she'd done things he didn't like, and would probably continue to do so until the day Aperture came crashing down around her. But in the end, all she'd done was try to survive and live her life, just like anyone else, and he couldn't fault her for that. Everyone deserved a second chance. Even homicidal supercomputers. He seemed to be better off here than up there, anyway. And who knew. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. She was different, she had changed somehow, and this was a story he'd get out of her if it took him days. As he suspected it would.

He now saw how the robot, Orange, she'd called it, had left the room: there was a panel that left a thirty degree gap between itself and the panel to the left of it. He ducked behind it and almost jumped out of his boots when he heard her speak.

"Thanks…"

She was looking at something he was pretty sure wasn't there and swaying back and forth, very slowly, and he didn't know if he wasn't meant to hear it, or if it had just taken her that long to say it. But it was only the result that mattered.

He smiled and went in search of the first real rest he'd had in a long, long time.

**Author's note**

**GLaDOS is sentient, therefore she desires company. Generally, we prefer like company, and Dr Rattmann is a scientist who knows how it feels to have voices in his head. He's probably known her the longest out of anyone in Portal, and therefore the best. He'd also probably have the most reason to understand why she does what she does. And 'Bite me' may not have been the most stimulating conversation she'd ever had, but as far as I know she's never had a casual conversation with anyone. She usually just responds to questions and baits people, who don't answer. He's the only one she's ever spoken to that knows what she is. She does talk to Wheatley later on, of course, but I imagine that she'd remember the first person who actually responded to her in kind. I think if they tried, they'd get along very well. We don't know anything about Dr Rattmann other than the fact that he's a schizophrenic scientist who worked on the Aperture Imaging Format who didn't agree with the GLaDOS Project, that he paints and talks to his cube to try and keep the madness from taking over, and that he basically initiated Portal. We really don't know a whole lot about his personality, other than the fact that he has a strong sense of responsibility. So I think that if GLaDOS put it right, he'd agree to stick around, especially what with the invasion and all that. He'd be pretty useless in the world of Half Life. Which I have now played, if anyone wants to know. **


End file.
